No abstract

The sharing of data between States, particularly during a transnational public emergency, is essential for, e.g., monitoring adequate responses. Yet, in the digital economy, it is the private sector that leads in the collection and processing of huge amounts of data on a global scale, while the public sector often lags behind. We begin the article by examining the shortcomings of the solutions developed in human rights law and in international economic law concerning access to public sector information and data. Afterwards, we propose three possibilities to provide adjustments of the regulatory framework governing data sharing in the era of big data: sectoral approach to data sharing, establishment of common standards for public sector information re-use, and the idea of ‘data altruism’ introduced in the Data Governance Act. We indicate how these solutions could facilitate the development of an international regulatory framework for data sharing on an international level.

A growing number of regional trade agreements include articles prohibiting access to or the transfer of source code as a condition of the import, distribution, sale, or use of software. We challenge this new approach to protecting source code in international economic law. Using Katharina Pistor’s theory of the ‘code of capital’, we find that this approach protects source code as capital at the expense of the regulatory power of states. The new approach differs from existing ways of protecting source code as well as from the protection based on copyrights, patents, trade secrecy, and provisions on forced technology transfer. We show that it establishes the secrecy of source code by default and leaves only a small window for states to require access to source code.

The objective of this paper is to provide insight into the regulatory solutions that refer to the electronic commerce (e-commerce) adopted in the regional trade agreements (RTAs) of the European Union. Our goal is to compare these regulatory measures with the obstacles indicated in the literature as key issues hampering international digital trade. We provide a formal-dogmatic analysis of all of the newly adopted RTAs. The findings resulting from this analysis indicate that even though the regulatory dimension of global economic trade attempts to somehow address the issues resulting from the specific characteristics of the digital economy, the process is still in its infancy. The majority of provisions do not consider the key problems that impede international digital trade. The originality of our work results from its focus on the most recent RTAs, the analysis of which is hardly present in the scholarship.